Villa Linnea – Building Log Homes

When things don’t slide #2

As mentioned so often in this blog, log homes want to settle down over time. Things that are not willing to settle down such as door frames, vertical lists, and stairs need to let things slide downwards (or break eventually under few tones of weight). The stairs to the second floor were also designed in a way that the second floor can slide downwards while the stairs stay put. Unfortunately, that didn’t really happen and the second floor is pulling the stairs downwards (and soon onto my electricity cabinet). So, it was time to do something about the lack of lubrication and motion.

Behind the cover board are the screws that hold up the entire stair construction.

8 screws in total is what keeps the stairs afloat. The second floor is supposed to slide downwards in the grooves in which the screws are. But that doesn’t really happen. I’m not sure whether the screws were too tight, the glue holding the cover board stops the movement, or the the stairs are just stuck at an angle. Anyway, things are not moving and I had to loosen the screws to push the stairs upwards again. Before I could loosen the screws I had to build a structure underneath the stairs to hold them up temporarily and lift them upwards.

The necessary “push” upwards was achieved by means of my trusted car jack standing on top of a board sharing the load over a few different floor tiles. I pushed the stairs about 15 mm upwards roughly to their original position. One can see how much the second floor had settled in the following two photos. The first one is from before the operation:

The second photo is taken after the “SlideByForce” project. Ultimately, the bannisters should be on the same height. But I’ll wait probably another two years before I repeat this maintenance project.